The corn sheller is an agricultural tool used to separate the corn kernels from the fibrous central part of the cob (cob). After harvesting, the cobs, from which the leaves (called bracts that make up the husk) were detached, were left to dry in the farmyard or collected in bunches and left to dry on the balconies of rural houses. Given the importance of this cereal, over time, various systems and tools for shelling corn have been invented.
There were manual shellers, made up of rectangular wooden boards with teeth of the same material, which allowed the corn to be shelled by rubbing the cob with a slight rotary movement on the teeth of the board, until the kernels came off. Some of them had holes to be fixed to a support such as a table.
In large farms where larger quantities of corn were processed, hand-cranked shellers were used. These are made up of a wooden seat in front of which is fixed a mechanism with a shelling compartment where the cobs were inserted and a metal toothed wheel, moved by a crank. The cob was passed through the opening and the manually moved toothed wheel separated the kernels from the cob.